Why Do Smart Homes Have Such a Bad Reputation?

“Smart homes are great… until they stop working.”

“You don’t want too much technology in the house.”

“My friend had one installed and nothing ever worked properly.”

We’ve heard variations of all three over the years.

And, to be fair, some homeowners have every reason to feel that way.

There are smart homes out there where the lights occasionally have a mind of their own, the Wi-Fi struggles in half the house, the heating requires three different apps and nobody dares change the router because they're not quite sure what will stop working.

But does that mean smart-home technology is inherently unreliable?

No. Smart-home technology can be extremely reliable when it is properly designed, installed and supported. Many of the problems blamed on smart homes actually stem from poor system design, inadequate networking, incorrect installation or a lack of specialist training and experience.

Why do smart homes go wrong?

One of the biggest misconceptions about smart-home technology is that it's simply another part of the electrical installation.

It involves cables. There are light switches. Things need power. So it's perfectly understandable that a homeowner, builder or developer might turn to the electrician already working on the project and ask:

“Can you do the smart-home stuff as well?”

Sometimes the answer should be yes.

There are electricians who have invested heavily in specialist training and have years of experience designing and installing these systems.

But there are also occasions where someone has effectively had a go.

They've installed a few smart switches before, used a particular Wi-Fi product at home or watched the manufacturer's training video, so taking on a complete house doesn't seem like too much of a leap.

Unfortunately, it can be.

Being good with wires doesn't make someone a smart-home specialist

This isn't a criticism of electricians. We work alongside excellent electricians on virtually every project we undertake.

It's simply a different discipline.

In the same way that we wouldn't claim to be able to design a consumer unit or rewire a house because we work with cables every day, installing smart technology requires its own knowledge and experience.

The physical installation is often the easy part.

The difficult bit is understanding how everything interacts.

Lighting, heating, audio, video, security, blinds, networking and control might all be separate systems, potentially made by different manufacturers, but the homeowner expects them to behave as one home.

That requires design.

It requires programming.

And, perhaps most importantly, it requires experience.

Experience is knowing what happens after installation

Product training can teach you how a system works.

Experience teaches you how it behaves in the real world.

What happens when the broadband goes down?

What happens when somebody replaces the internet router?

Will the lighting still operate normally if the control processor develops a fault?

Is the Wi-Fi network capable of supporting the number of devices in the house?

Will those products still make sense in five years?

Can another engineer understand the system if they need to service it?

What happens when the homeowner wants to extend it?

And does the person living in the house actually understand how to use it?

These aren't particularly exciting questions.

But they're the questions that often separate a reliable smart home from one that becomes a constant source of frustration.

The network is a perfect example

We regularly see significant sums of money spent on screens, speakers, CCTV, lighting controls and automation while the network underneath it all has been treated almost as an afterthought.

Yet almost everything in a modern home now relies on that network.

You wouldn't build a house on inadequate foundations and then blame the kitchen when cracks appeared in the walls.

Smart-home technology is much the same.

If the underlying infrastructure hasn't been properly designed, even very good products can appear unreliable.

But there's another reason we hear more smart-home horror stories

There are simply far more smart homes than there used to be.

Or, more accurately, there are far more homes containing smart technology.

Smart lighting, connected heating, video doorbells, wireless speakers, security cameras, smart TVs, voice assistants and app-controlled appliances are now commonplace.

As the number of systems in people's homes increases, so does the number of people who will experience problems with them.

And when something goes wrong, people talk about it.

They post on forums.

They ask questions on Facebook.

They leave reviews.

They tell their friends that their “smart home never works”.

Far fewer people go online to report:

“Just an update: my lights came on correctly again today.”

Reliable technology tends to disappear into the background.

Which is exactly what it should do.

A good smart home should actually be quite boring

That might sound like an odd thing for a smart-home company to say.

But after working with this technology for around two decades, we've come to believe that one of the best signs of a properly designed smart home is that you stop thinking about it.

You press a button and the lights respond.

You turn on the television and the right equipment starts.

Music plays in the room you selected.

The heating maintains the temperature.

The Wi-Fi works throughout the house.

The blinds close when they're supposed to.

You shouldn't need to understand what processor is controlling it, which network switch it's connected to or which protocol is being used behind the scenes.

It should simply work.

More technology isn't necessarily a smarter home

Another lesson experience teaches you is that the answer isn't always to automate everything.

It's very easy to make a house technically impressive and practically irritating.

Just because something can be automated doesn't mean it should be.

Sometimes a button is better.

Sometimes conventional control is better.

Sometimes two systems shouldn't be integrated simply because it's technically possible to make them talk to each other.

Good smart-home design isn't about squeezing as much technology as possible into a property.

It's about choosing the right technology and making it easy to live with.

So how do you avoid getting smart-home technology wrong?

If you're building or renovating a home, look at the experience of the person designing the technology rather than simply the products they're proposing.

Ask them how long they've been installing systems.

Ask what training they have.

Ask to see previous projects.

Ask what happens if something fails.

Ask who supports the system afterwards.

And ask them to explain why they're recommending a particular approach.

A good integrator should be able to explain the reasoning without hiding behind technical jargon.

They should also be comfortable telling you when you don't need something.

It all comes down to experience and training

Smart-home technology has changed enormously during the time we've worked in the industry.

Products have changed. Manufacturers have come and gone. Networks have become vastly more important. Homeowners expect more from their technology than ever before.

But one thing hasn't changed.

The quality of the finished system depends enormously on the people who design, install, program and support it.

A badly designed smart home can absolutely be frustrating.

A properly designed one shouldn't feel complicated at all.

In fact, most of the time you shouldn't really notice it.

And perhaps that's part of the reason you hear so much more about the bad ones.